UPDATE Some phone service restored after outage

Some service may not be restored for another 3-5 hours. Work crews damaged fiber cables around the same time in both south Sarasota County and the Orlando area.

JOHN HIELSCHER

Thousands of Verizon Wireless customers lost service for hours Friday after work crews damaged fiber cables around the same time in both south Sarasota County and the Orlando area.

The rare double-break to FPL FiberNet lines caused outages for phone and data services from the Tampa Bay area through Manatee and Sarasota counties and farther south.

Some service was interrupted around noon, said April Reynolds, director of customer operations at FPL FiberNet, and by mid-afternoon repairs were not expected to be completed for another three to five hours.

"As soon as we repair one or the other, service will be restored," Reynolds said.

Some Verizon customers did report restored service by the afternoon. Some Verizon landline customers also were impacted.

An unidentified work crew damaged an FPL FiberNet aerial line on Toledo Blade Boulevard in North Port, Reynolds said.

Companies like Verizon use FPL's fiber network to serve their customers.

Verizon Wireless spokesman Chuck Hemby said he did not know how many customers lost service during the outage.

"I'm not sure we would even know that," he said.

If just one of the fiber lines had been damaged, service likely would have remained because traffic could have been switched to the working system, Reynolds said.

"Fiber damage in itself is unusual," she said. "To have both occur at the same time is very unusual."

EARLIER: Phone service and more for thousands of people was affected for several hours Friday after a major fiber-optic cable was disrupted.

Verizon Wireless reported that service had been restored for most customers by 3 p.m. A Verizon Wireless spokesman blamed the disruption on a Florida Power & Light fiber-optic cable issue but could not provide more details.

Social media reports showed problems from Lakeland to Tampa and Sarasota. A commenter on the Herald-Tribune's Facebook page reported no service in Port Charlotte. The problems include cell phone service and data plans.